SENSEMAKING:

INQUIRY 2.0

"Science is fundamentally about making sense of the natural world. Sensemaking is the conceptual process in which a learner actively engages with the natural or designed world, wonders about it, and then develops, tests, and refines ideas." Source: Illuminate Education

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What is Sensemaking?

Science is fundamentally about making sense of the natural world. Sense-making is the conceptual process in which a learner actively engages with the natural or designed world, wonders about it, and then develops, tests, and refines ideas.

We often use the phrase “figure something out.” When you are trying to figure something out, you are trying to make sense of it. You are engaged in the process of sense-making. Essentially, sense-making is about actively trying to figure out the way the world works (for scientific questions) and exploring how to create or alter things to achieve design goals (for engineering questions).

Coordinating Practices to Achieve Sensemaking

Source: Helping Students Make Sense of the World

The emphasis on science and engineering practices attempts to build on prior reforms and take advantage of what research has revealed about the successes and limitations of inquiry classrooms. We like to think of the focus on practices as a kind of Inquiry 2.0—not  a replacement for inquiry but rather a second wave that articulates more clearly what successful inquiry looks like when it results in building scientific knowledge. The configuration of inquiry classrooms typically allows students to explore the relationship between  two variables (e.g., how the mass of a toy car affect its velocity going down a ramp), but often this empirical exploration is not taking place in an ongoing process of questioning,  developing, and refining explanatory knowledge about the world. Testing and confirming or disconfirming hypotheses is part of science, but these actions become meaningful by being a part of the broader work of building explanatory models and theories. 

This attempt to take our ideas of inquiry in science beyond designing investigations and testing hypotheses has led to the fuller articulation of inquiry as the scientific and engineering practices that enable us to investigate and make sense of phenomena in the world by building and applying explanatory models, and by designing solutions for problems. Making sense of the world, or sense-making for short, is the fundamental goal of science and should be at the core of what happens in science classrooms. 

How do we use the science and engineering practices to work toward sensemaking? It may be tempting to think of the practices as a sequence, perhaps like “the scientific method” or as an instructional sequence like the 5Es. There are many different paths to take through the practices, depending on the specific investigation or design problem. And practices may need to be brought in at multiple points as students build and refine an explanation, model, or design. But regardless of the path, there are four guiding questions that can help organize the work of the practices as part of sense-making.

1. WHAT ARE WE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT? 

What is the observable phenomenon, object, or system we are trying to figure out or the problem we are trying to define? Investigations and engineering problems are built around phenomena and the questions connected with them. Engaging in practices means that we are always trying to figure something out or solve a problem connected with some phenomenon in the world rather than defining terminology (such as “What is gravity/energy/an ecosystem?”). While the word phenomenon is not explicitly part of the names of any of the eight practices, phenomena are central to what the practices are all about. One goal of the NGSS is connecting the science that students learn with the application of these ideas in the world. What can we explain with this idea? What problems do these ideas help us understand and solve? When engaging in practices, there must be something about the world we are trying to figure out. In other words, there is some event (such as an earthquake, a storm, movement of objects in a collision, change of materials in a chemical reaction) or a pattern (resemblances of offspring to prior generations, changes in atmospheric conditions before a storm, changing shapes of the Moon) that we are trying to figure out or problems connected with events or patterns that we are trying to understand to design a solution (e.g., early warning system for tsunamis, less polluting sources of energy). In science, once we recognize the phenomenon, we need to ask about the what, how, and why. For engineering, once we have a problem, we ask what factors are influencing this problem and how we can intervene to alter these factors

The most obvious practice involved in making sense of the world is Asking Questions and Defining Problems. But it’s important to stress that sense-making is an incremental process. Questions will arise not only in the beginning of an investigation or design but also throughout the process of sense-making. In our attempts to explain phenomena, we may uncover new questions or realize that our models work for some parts of the phenomenon but not others. We may end up in the Asking Questions and Defining Problems practice as we are in the midst of trying to design solutions, construct explanations, or develop models, as well as when we are starting an investigation or design. Further-more, we may need to compare alternative questions or framing of the design problem in principled ways, drawing on the practice of argumentation. So part of refining what we are trying to figure out needs to build on the next three questions.

2. HOW WILL WE FIGURE IT OUT? 

How will we develop, explore, and test the model and associated explanation or solution? When we have phenomena that motivate questions to investigate and problems to address, another collection of practices comes into play to make progress on the work: Planning and Carrying Out Investigations. Typically, this may also involve clarifying what is known to inform the investigation or design, which draws on the practice of Obtaining and Evaluating Information. Again, because of the incremental nature of sense-making, constructing explanations and developing solutions will be ongoing, perhaps with initial ideas informing the planning of subsequent investigations or design explorations. Argumentation may be needed to make principled decisions between competing investigation plans and design ideas.

3. HOW DO WE KEEP TRACK OF WHAT WE ARE FIGURING OUT? 

Making sense of what we are seeing goes hand in hand with planning and conducting the investigation or design work. Key questions related to this aspect of sense-making include “What happened?,” “Is this what we expected?,” “What worked?,” “What didn’t work?, “and, most important, “Why did this happen the way that it did?” Rather than viewing investigation or design as a sequential process, proceeding stepwise from questioning to planning to solution, it is often more accurate and productive to view sense-making as incrementally building understanding or solutions, engaging in cycles of questioning, gathering data through investigations or tests of part of a design, making sense by developing or revising models, constructing explanations or solutions, and then evaluating progress and determining where to go next. For this to be effective, we have to have a way to keep track of what we are figuring out along the way. There are many effective strategies for this kind of work (see Windschitl and Thompson 2013 for a nice summary of some tools). The practices central here are Analyzing Data and Using Mathematics and Computational Thinking, which feed into the processes of Developing and Using Models, Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions, and Obtaining, Evaluating, and Communicating Information. Argumentation is especially important in a classroom since there are often many different emerging student ideas, which the class will need to compare, evaluate, and eventually reach consensus about.

4. HOW DOES IT ALL FIT TOGETHER? WHAT DOES IT MEAN? 

How does what we have figured out answer the questions or solve the problems we identified? How do we decide? Ultimately, our goal is to develop deep understanding of the disciplinary core ideas that help us account for how the world works the way it does. We have to continually check our developing ideas against the phenomena that inspired our work to begin with. Two practices that are central in this process are Developing and Using Models and Constructing Explanations and Designing Solutions. In other words, we have to see if what we have figured out so far is helpful in answering the questions that drove us at the beginning of our inquiry. This cycle of wondering, working to figure out, and checking whether our emerging ideas are actually useful to satisfy our initial wondering is at the core of deep engagement in the practices. As has been necessary throughout the process, we also need to engage in principled evaluation of competing ideas through argumentation and reaching consensus as well as the processes of communicating information.

Example of a Sense Making Sequence

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